Personally, I found the idea of an impossible singularity quite refreshing.
It does make sense that no matter how smart the system is, it still needs time to learn and master the environment.
So even an above-human artificial intelligence will not immediately cause singularity.

Less than a week ago I've learned about a potentially interesting initiative, called "Digital immortality". Citing the email I've received from Josh, this initiative aims to apply strong AI for the creation of digital minds/modules to allow us to upload human minds to a digital form so as to live indefinitely and expand the capabilities of our minds.

Udacity project has its roots in the previously mentioned "Introduction to AI" Stanford online course. Udacity currently offers 2 courses: CS101 "Building a search engine" and CS373 "Programming a robotic car"; these two had already started, and even have first homework deadline within a day or two; more courses are promised in the nearest future. Both use Python for programming assignments.

Reading through a discussion of AI-based Transactional Analysis real-life application at Genifer google group it suddenly struck me that the most basic requirement for a real strong AI / AGI would be... self-consciousness! And this is exactly what is missing in those amateur AI projects I am aware of.

Really, think of that. Most-productive projects come up with heaps of logic algorithms and Bayesian networks used for this and that, while none seems to focus on creating AI "self".

For the artificial intelligence, there is an important concept of the software capable of rewriting (or amending) its own source code. As a modification of this basic idea, an intelligent program might be able to write other (possibly intelligent) programs.

This is already happening. Some people call this the automation pressure, others refer to the informational society (as a kind of a post-industrial society). And this is where I see the purpose of creating an artificial intelligence.

GNAT for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT is a GPL port for the GNAT compilation system to the LEGO NXT robotic platform, designed to offer an educational platform for teaching and learning embedded systems development.

I've started looking for a position in the AI-related field, both research and hybrid research/commercial opportunities.
I will be able to start somewhere at the beginning of 2010, soon after I defend my bioinformatics PhD thesis.